War of Legends:Why did War of Legends fail?
This page is an essay created by Glflegolas. In it, I will describe the reasons why I think that War of Legends ultimately was a commercial failure for Jagex. If you have something to add this essay, please add it. Flawed Microtransaction system The idea of WoLCash, when it was first introduced to the game, was fairly decent; it was such that a Free-to-play player could get to the top of their server, but that Pay-to-play players would have a few small advantages over F2P. However, with the price of most items being fairly low, frequent sales, and frequent double-top-ups, it was such that for about $10 US you could get 200 WoLCash. This was enough to buy all the Reflections you'd ever need, and, with that amount of virtual cash, you would probably be able to buy some pretty decent armour. And even if you didn't spend a cent, you could still get armour and even reflections if you kept at it for a while. Unfortunately, when True Legends came around, that changed. Armour became much more expensive, and the need for reflectons pretty much meant the F2P players were at a major disadvantage. This divide increased when Ascended legends came out. The addition of Market trading helped somewhat, but it still was not enough to offset the divide created by very expensive gems, armour, Restore Seeds, and legends. The drops from paradises were also disproportionate; players who didn't pay couldn't get the armour they would need to do Floor 20, and conversely Buzhou Mountain drops were unbalanced, in that the drops from the floor below were too poor to allow the player to do the next floor without paying; there are reports of players spending $1000.- or more in total to Jagex for WoLCash. Developer vs Publisher Relationship War of Legends was published by Jagex to a Western, English Language player base. The game was developed by Ultizen, closely based on the original Chinese version. On the face of it the Jagex/Ultizen partnership had a lot of advantages. Ultizen had an already coded and published a game that simply needed the investment of translation, whilst Jagex offered promotion of the game a new audience and it's huge RuneScape player base. Together the two could take an existing product to a new player base with only a small investment and minimal business risk. In reality the execution between the two was shambolic and forum posts from moderators suggested a fractured relationship. In hindsight one of the most critical decisions was to tweak the game for a western audience, so that the English language version was not simply a translation of the Chinese version, but required its own build. That build was never stable, was bugged, laggy and glitchy. The quality of the game to come was somewhat flagged from the start by the terrble job done on the translations. As a player, it felt like Jagex would not promote the game as it was buggy and unreliable. With the amount of manual labour required to unstick legends and the like Jagex probably did not see the game as scalable. The bigger the player base the more and more staff that would be required to provide support the game, a level of cost that made for an unsustainable business model. For Ultizen the promised expansion to a massive new audience did not arrive. Faced with focusing development time on the popular Chinese version or fixing the English language version, they stuck with the money they could bank on. So the game was stuck in limbo, the bugs would not be fixed until the English version was a flourshing commercial succes but Jagex would not promote it and drive that success until the bugs were fixed. The two companies never closed this circle and in doing so consigned the English language version to a tiny player base and it's ultimate doom. This likely the main reason why War of Legends did not ever become the commercial success it could have. Too many servers This is a minor problem, but when Jagex opened so many servers, in anticipation of a large player base, it meant that the player community became really spread out. As a result, many servers had only a handful of active players, and many new players would be reluctant to join because the community appeared to be so small. Laggy servers Many servers had a large amount of lag when doing anything. This would not have helped the game remain popular with new players. Inability to attract new players Because of the way that Jagex ran the game, it meant that almost all the people playing the game joined in 2010, when the game first started. Then, as the playerbase began to dwindle, so did Jagex's profits. New players were likely deterred by the lag, but especially the difficulty of becoming a top player without paying; a player who joined in 2012 would have had to pay a lot if he wanted to be among the top 100 players of the server. Security Breach Officially, the reason why the game was closed was due to a security breach on December 22, 2014, and the inability of Utilzen to make a patch. But the security breach was really only the straw that broke the camel's back; for months, the playerbase of WoL was dwindling, due to old players getting bored and new players not joining. Thus, this security breach was a good excuse for Jagex to close the game forever. THEY NEEDED NEW SERVERS..... THATS WHAT KILLED THE GAME FOREAL!!!EVERYONE QUIT. Farewell notes This section of the page is dedicated to farewell notes of former players. KINGS DESTINY PLAYERS been a long time to say my goodby welcome you all or any players to contact me on skype, make sure you post ur player name so i know who you are.... reconkangas Goodbye, everyone from Black Dragon, Soaring Eagle, and Kings' Destiny. It was good to know you. I play Illyriad now on occasion. ~Glflegolas I Miss you all so very much. TGH/Anzac Eventide snake./DrJay555 hi jay, balthazar198 here. there are a few players from ES on a similar game 'alliance warfare' ( server OB1) DJ Moody / Legacy / Royal Garden Miss everyone who I played with. @balthazar198 I applied to the alliance. -Azure Wings I have heard on the grapevine that there's a new version of War of Legends in the works. Anyone know anything?' Haven't heard anything about it. ~Glf. Gunnin Boy (MT) here, and if anyone wonders, I am still selling chaos stones and reflections (0.5 wol for 1 ratio) To all the souls from my alliance.. I miss you.. I am sad to see this game go.. farewell ma, pa, and bro.. -DBear616 If anyone finds a similar game, please do share. Whatever mmorts I try it doens't seem to be the same and have the amount of content that WoL had. I found a similer game like WOL i would say its far far better , try out Clash Of Clans its a strict mobile game , try it and post your username here so I can help you out there ~ Slowwest / Eventideking / GamblerGrid Anyone from Raining Blood or Zulu Threat (especially dot if you are reading this) Hi from Starmove..... Havent found a computer game like it but couple phone games really similar..... btw clash of clans is too much like cartoons but another castle building troop making game called Clash of Kings is more real looking.... also on Empire War of Kings is like War of Legengs. I'M in Kingdom 3 in alliance called "The Medieval Warriors". I am Aragorn and need some good active players. AI miss War of Legends too and these games are as good as I have found so far to it. I've even messaged the Mods and Devs of suggestions to do these games like War of Legends since its so close to it. Hi everyone, Suaromon from ES here. Ive been playing runescape since the game closed down, anyone playing there feel free to contact me, my PM is always on, my RSN is suaraun. I see several people are looking for a game similar to WOL, I happen to have some info on the matter. Back in May of 2015 I received an email from a former Jagex employee who, before leaving jagex to work on his own projects, had been one of the WOL mods. He explained that he was looking for people to help test out a new version of WOL that he and several other former employees had put together, and wondered if it was something I was interested in. At the time, I was still trying to find a new game to get into, so I along with several other players from ES agreed to do some beta testing for them. While not the same game by any means, it did have a lot of the same backstory, and did have the mmorts aspects. I stopped playing after about a week, but last I heard it had a decent player base, and was officially out of Beta. The game can be found at ☀http://legends.world/ if anyone is interested. Best of luck if you decide to play.